


the eyes at the heights of my baby

by zhelaniye



Series: there is only one war [3]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Pining, Pre-Relationship, character study sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23719732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zhelaniye/pseuds/zhelaniye
Summary: She's a balance between violence and gentleness, and she has the light he has been bereft of for so long.
Relationships: Female Adaar/Blackwall | Thom Rainier
Series: there is only one war [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629265
Kudos: 10





	the eyes at the heights of my baby

When thunder rolls across the hills of the fallow mire, the heavy rain almost drowns the noise out. The lightning that follows illuminates the demolished archway that looms over their heads and the grimness etched in the lines of Adaar’s face. 

She leans on the wall, not hiding her flinch when her injured leg has to support her weight as she shifts it, quietly watching as the agents they’ve dragged themselves to the deepest pit of southern Ferelden to help pour out of their cell.

“Perhaps you should see a healer”, Blackwall hears himself saying. 

Adaar studies the blood pouring out of the sharp cut in her leg, hastily bandaged with a piece of fabric she’d torn out of the avvar’s chief’s clothes in an uncharacteristic act of pettiness. 

“Perhaps I should”, she replies, matter-of-factly.

With a groan, she straightens her spine and smiles at him before moving towards the damp stairs where Cassandra and Varric sat - bickering, no doubt, if the frown in Cassandra’s face and the small smile she quite obviously trying to suppress was anything to go by - to discuss the logistics of getting thirty injured agents, and themselves, back to Haven.

There’s something different, something intrinsically her in the way she moves, and Blackwall finds himself staring, as he has caught himself doing more and more lately. 

She has no conventional beauty, nothing that would be praised in ridiculously ornamented orlesian halls, no soft round lips and delicate hands. Instead, her hands are rough and calloused and scarred, marked by a harsh life and innumerable years of being clenched around the hilts of swords and axes, bent into weapons, strong and deadly. There’s a scar on her face, from her upper lip right to the center of her left cheek, swallowing the freckles that mottle her face, thin and shallow enough that it speaks of a properly tended to wound, but it still marks her as a warrior, more than the armor and broad shoulders or even the horns do. 

But she’s beautiful to him, painfully so. Blackwall thinks it would surprise her if he told her of her beauty, not because she would doubt of the sincerity of his words, but because he doubt she has ever thought about herself in that light, or spared any thought to the idea of beauty at all. Hired qunari blades are not beautiful, they’re useful. She knows herself to be strong, dutiful, fierce, a force to be reckoned with - but beauty, the idea of it and the meaning it would bring to her life were it something that would mark her idea of self, have never had any part of it.

And still, Blackwall watches her, and tries to drown out the treacherous voice in his mind that pulls on him, almost as a physical force, to get closer to her, to open himself to her in a way he has refused to do for so many long years to anyone, including himself. 

He’s watched her charge headfirst into battle, sharpened muscles performing every step of the fight as if it was a dance that made up with expertise and pragmatism what it lacks in finesse. She’s seen her swiftly put down templars and mages alike, unflinchingly stare down demons and giants, has felt her fierce warcry seep into his very bones and charge them with a vitality he has not felt since he was younger and prouder and still a faithful believer. 

But he’s also watched her kneel on a battlefield and help a soldier to their feet, adjusting her strength and height to avoid compromising them, he’s watched her shuffle cards ably in the warm light of the tavern, her booming laughter coming out of her in spasms as Bull and Sera stare at her incredulously when she smugly reveals a winning hand, he’s seen her enter a fortress full of blighted templars and face the worst and bloodiest of betrayals and still offer mercy without a moment’s hesitation. 

There’s a gentleness in her, a warm stillness that, unbeknownst to her, marks everything she does. Even in battle, each strike, each swing of her axe is calculated with just the right amount of strength, just the right amount of violence - that is her, through and though. A balance. A woman keeping herself in the edge of the sword, violence and gentleness, pain and kindness, scars and beauty. 

“Aren’t you coming?”, her voice cuts through the fog in her mind, his surroundings sharpen as he startles out of his thoughts. 

“Can’t leave you”, he replies, “who are you going to drag to the ass end of Ferelden next time, otherwise?”

She laughs, loud and warm, like everything she does, and the sound bounces off the walls spurring him on. 

“Admit it, there is really nowhere you’d rather be”, she says, already walking towards the group of soldiers clamoring for her attention as they prepare to leave, the smile never leaving her face.

And were Blackwall another man, he would have replied with the heartfelt truth. But there’s something about that woman that feels like a divine kind of absolution, and it burns if he touches it for too long. She smiles at him and it feels as if he could, if he tried, wash his sins away just to bathe in her light. As if she would gently pry his secrets away from his grasp and hold his hand. But the life he’s led, the name he wears, etched into his past and his heart, are too heavy a burden to carry alone, and he would never sully her light with it. 

So he declines it when she offers him a drink back in Haven, intent clear in her eyes and her words, and tears his eyes away from the open affection he sees in her, the one she shows shamelessly, as sure of herself in this as in everything else.

It is what you do what you find a holy relic, after all. You do not spoil it, lest the holiness washes away and the ugliness of the world seeps into it. 

Later, however, he will stand on a forest and watch a mountain fall on her, the deafening noise giving way to a desperate kind of silence. Later still, Cullen would drag her body off the snow and she will be breathing and he will kneel down and pray, truly pray for the first time in more than a decade. And even later, with her feet bleeding and her heart aching from the losses, with her new title weighing heavily on her shoulders, she will ask him to accept her affections. 

And perhaps Blackwall is weak, but both of them should be dead and aren’t. So he will kiss her, will hold her, feel her body curl against his, tenderly, not an inch of violence to it, and he will swear to fight to deserve her, even if he knows he does not, probably will never.

But for now, he watches her, silently, and if when their eyes meet his heart beats faster, well, she is none the wiser. 

**Author's Note:**

> no plot just a sad mountain man being in love
> 
> title from 'as it was' by hozier


End file.
